New Quad Core iMac released (20 October 2009)

[mhschmieder]

http://www.apple.com/?aosid=p204&siteid ... 9cda5f558e

This is a rush posting, as I just found out about this as I was about to leave work for an appointment. I'll post more later from home if time.

[Frodo]

My brother-in-law just got a great deal on a 2007/24" iMac because it was "mysteriously" discounted last week in advance of these new models being released.

The latest models are impressive for a lot of reasons-- not the least of which include an 8GB RAM capacity plus a whole lotta other stuff which would have been unheard of before the not-too-distant past.

[timriley]

I think the two 27 inch models can take up to 16gb of ram now! Although not cheaply...

I would have liked to have seen an ExpressCard/34 slot personally but don't think thats gonna happen unfortunately.

[HCMarkus]

Would be a fantastic machine for DAW work but for the lack of eSATA or Express Card Slot. With an eSata PM port, Apple wouldn't sell as many Mac Pros... oh. I get it.

[timriley]

Would be a fantastic machine for DAW work but for the lack of eSATA or Express Card Slot. With an eSata PM port, Apple wouldn't sell as many Mac Pros... oh. I get it.

Yep, that's my thinking too!

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

Would be a fantastic machine for DAW work but for the lack of eSATA or Express Card Slot. With an eSata PM port, Apple wouldn't sell as many Mac Pros... oh. I get it.

Me three

[newrigel]

Would be a fantastic machine for DAW work but for the lack of eSATA or Express Card Slot. With an eSata PM port, Apple wouldn't sell as many Mac Pros... oh. I get it.

The revised SATA chipset controllers on the 2009 MP's mobo are totally different than the iMacs or the older gen MP's. The speed of the iMacs are half of what the MP's are and when dealing with audio and video files... this is a big difference! Still a bottleneck with the ESATA cards compared to the new revision of on board controllers.

[mhschmieder]

I am confused by your points, newrigel, as I have never seen this brought up before and am not sure which specs to look at to confirm and to delve deeper.

Every time I look at MBP specs (which is what I guess you mean by MP), they way underperform the top-end iMacs in every regard.

If what you say is true, then I should reconsider an MBP route, but it has always seemed from the specs I could find that there are no internal bus or wiring advantages over the iMacs and if anything a disadvantage.

I'm not challenging you per se; just surprised as I have literally never seen anyone else ever mention that the disk access on the MBP is faster than on the iMac, and that this also applies to the eSATA port.

For external firwire drives, I would think that there would be no obvious advantage of either Mac category. And most of us will be recording audio data to something other than the system drive, as well as storing our sample libraries in outboard memory devices.

So, for which benchmarks are you saying the MBP would outperform the new iMacs? And have any been published yet? I visited one benchmark site today (Primate Labs), but their last update was June 2009.

[mhschmieder]

I'm sure by now that everyone has seen the three or four independent performance tests that uniformly have the new i5 and i7 iMacs ahead of the MacPro's for everything except Mathematica and other programs that actually take advantage of multi-threading and multi-core directly.

I was all set to buy an i7 last night, after a whole weekend of research to confirm this decision, but everyone is back-ordered. The i5 is on huge markdown through tonight, but even at its temporary price, which is 21% below the i7 base model, the performance differential has me holding out for the i7, since I would like my next Mac to last as long or longer as my current one. Some scores have it 30-35% faster; others have it 6-10% faster. The latter figure is probably more realistic for most apps.

Disappointingly, Photoshop does not seem to benefit from either model. I imagine DP does though, but I'm once again torn on whether it is better to switch over to Windows for long-term future-proofing of vendor commitment (Vienna Symphonic Library being a key factor, along with the eLicenser dongle), and get two cheaper computers (one PC, one Mac) instead. Yet none of the two-computer setup approaches appeal to me (even including the one that Dave Polich uses, which is unfortunately incompatible with how Vienna Ensemble Pro wants to work).

Waiting a few weeks on one or two rounds of back-orders probably means I'll hold out yet again, as new MacPro's are just around the corner and we might see a mini-tower this time around, finally. But the i7 and even the i5 iMac are incredible bang-for-buck, and the LED backlighting does aid quite a bit in cutting down glare. Some say glossy is better for photo work anyway, as matte can obscure details and colour accuracy. After all, CRT's are glossy and still the choice of most graphics professionals (though LCD's and OLED's and even some LED-enhanced LCD's are finally getting there).

[mhschmieder]

Hmm, newrigel's comments about the MBP vs. iMac on the main DP forum have me rethinking the i7 iMac purchase, as I didn't realize there's more you can do with the internal hard drive of the MBP than the iMac.

As new MBP's may be very soon due to the notebooks now being Apple fastest-selling computer line and thus getting faster product updates, and as it is already pretty much known to be i7-based, and as the i7 iMacs are back-ordered anyway, it might pay not to do a pre-order on an i7 iMac and keep an open mind about the new MBP's (and even MacPro's if we get lucky and they finally release a mid-tower).

I personally can't wait much longer though, as I'm on my last legs with my G4 iMac and am putting a couple of projects on hold until a new computer, and the latest I can delay those projects is mid-to-late January (at least in terms of starting them). I'll probably do some low-key prep work that is low-risk, between now and then, without stressing myself like I've been doing, trying to do too much on the G4.

I've always considered notebooks to be a waste of money for people whose lifestyle does not need to accomodate an on-the-go computer (iMacs are quite fine for occasional location recording, so are semi-portable). But the new iMac lineup is quite a surprise for most people, and more surprises may be in store with the next notebooks and desktops from Apple, in terms of actual price and bang-for-buck.

I'm going to once again research what people are doing to swap out drives on their current MBP's to improve their streaming library performance etc. and throughput with eSATA and other options unique to the MBP (and also revisit which models in the revised MB/MBP cutoff are truly pro products, since it is now a somewhat arbitrary divison between the MB-branded and MBP-branded models).

[newrigel]

I am confused by your points, newrigel, as I have never seen this brought up before and am not sure which specs to look at to confirm and to delve deeper.

Every time I look at MBP specs (which is what I guess you mean by MP), they way underperform the top-end iMacs in every regard..

No no no... I was comparing the post before mine in a quote about the iMacs and about the MacBook Pros use of RAID controllers compared to a Mac Pro! When I type MP I mean Mac Pro! MBP is a Mac Book Pro he he!

Would be a fantastic machine for DAW work but for the lack of eSATA or Express Card Slot. With an eSata PM port, Apple wouldn't sell as many Mac Pros... oh. I get it.

Sorry if that's confusing anyone! But the new controller chips on the Mac Pro's are faster than the previous generation MP's... There are mods that can can give up to 2GB per second in the MP's! Now this is disk throughput and streaming from and writing to drives is what us audio users need and this bottleneck has been alleviated here. They are faster than any express card eSATA card could be due to the actual on logic board controller chips on the new Mac Pro's (2009)... there's really no comparison.
You know, I do a lot of really disk intensive and processor intensive tasks and I think a MacBook Pro would probably get too hot and burn up doing the things I do because they are not designed to crunch numbers and render over extended periods of time (hence the battery) so if your into anything that requires this a Mac Pro is the only way to go...
But the new i7-i5 iMacs are a formidable player for audio... you just have to get by the storage thing in which there's where you'll have the problems. If you want to expand they are not the way to go really.

[mhschmieder]

Aha; I had never seen MacPro's abbreviated before, but have previously seen people leave out the "B" when abbreviating MacBook pro's.

Good points, all. As we know, everything is a compromise with Apple products since they limit the configurability and expandability even of the MacPro's (though not that much in the case of the towers). I get jealous every time I look at Rain's customized Windows boxes, until I remember they are Windows boxes.

Well, midnight has passed and my opportunity has gone to take advantage of BillMe Later so that I can pre-order an i7 and pay for it when it arrives (when I'll have the money) vs. up-front like B&H wants.

Probably a good thing. I may feel like I can't wait much longer for a new Mac, but there's always plenty to do that is on the back burner, so it may be better for me to wait and see. So if i7's become available for immediate shipping vs. back-order by Christmas, I might still spring for one. Otherwise, I might hold out for JAN/FEB announcements.

One thing is for sure though, especially with the new specs of what is looking to be a real leapfrog generation compared to the last few cycles of updates, and that's that I'm not going to let one more cycle of updates pass me by in order to hold out for better choices on the next go around. It's pretty clear the economy is forcing Apple to make more customer-friendly design and configuration choices this time.

[mhschmieder]

Just for the record, I've decided to hold out for new MacPro's and hopefully a mid-tower, come JAN or FEB 2010 -- if my current Mac lasts that long, and if I can hold on to my sanity through yet another project on this machine.

The deciding factor for me is the minimum latency, which I didn't realize until last week is affected more by external vs. internal drive access than anything else (all else being equal, which it more or less now is).

I am primarily a bassist, and thus am very sensitive to latency -- it is in fact one of the reasons I've been prioritizing my MIDI projects since switching from tape to computer-based recording.

I rather naively assumed that more CPU power, more memory, and FW800 vs. FW400, would allow me to get the latency down to its lowest setting, but several people have posted here and other places on the net, with clear information about the limitations of FW800 (which is OK for audio interfaces but not for data drives during multi-tracking and especially overdubbing).

If my computer should fail before a new MacPro is released, or if APple does a repeat and releases a Dead End and crippled overpriced "entry-level" MacPro as they did this past year, then all bets are off -- I may as well buy a used 2008 model in that case.

Hopefully Apple learned their lesson and will not only not put out a so-called "pro" machine that can't be upgraded past 8 GB of RAM (or was it 16 GB?), but will return to making available an entry-level tower more in the $2K range vs. the $3K range as it stands now.

[newrigel]

If my computer should fail before a new MacPro is released, or if APple does a repeat and releases a Dead End and crippled overpriced "entry-level" MacPro as they did this past year, then all bets are off -- I may as well buy a used 2008 model in that case.

I bought one of the crippled Mac pros and I haven't seen the "out of DSP resources" dialog since I've owned it (but I only paid $400 for it since I sold my 2007 Mac Pro for close to $2k and bought a refurb then I had to put ram in it but it was dirt cheap compared to the last one.)
My last Mac Pro used to get it all the time and the new QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) in this new 2009 Mac Pro has really helped... it seems because the ram controller runs 1:1 @ the processor speed (no FSB) so these machines are wicked fast... plus, they don't get as hot as the i7's do. There has been a big thing about the processors getting hot... just google "i7's overheating." Most of it stems from over-clocking but they are 130 watts compared to the 85 W of the 3520's in the 2.66 Mac Pros. This means they are designed for heavy processor loads and stay way cooler in high performance environments.
But to say this Mac Pro is crippled... well.
I'll end up selling this one for the new ones coming out next year... I like to turn them over every year and a half so I can still get some $$ for them.

By the way.. you are using a G4 right? Your sessions from that wouldn't even register on the Nehalem! SERIOUSLY!

[mhschmieder]

Yeah, but after eking performance out of this beast for 8-1/2 years, and considering MacPro's are CURRENTLY (yet not always historically) uber-expensive, it seems stupid to deliberately limit oneself to the same amount of RAM that a much cheaper iMac can handle. That's my point -- it woulod likely force an early upgrade, which puts it in "Dead End" category.

I personally consider anything a Dead End that more or less HAS to be swapped for something else in five years or less (or, preferably, eight to ten years or less). I resent our throwaway culture and have lived accordingly, resisting all consumer devices and anything else designed for obsolescence.